Vic, Spain. This year’s Formator’s course has gone a long way already. It began in preparing them to have a good discernment; then a deepening of the autobiography of our Father Founder and know the most important places in his early years; studies on congregational history followed. After the historical part it went to an extension of what was already known about the constitutions; and ended with the theme on interculturality, which characterizes us as brothers in the Congregation.
At this moment, they are now looking into the martyrial dimension which moves them deeply to look at our charismatic roots and to try to live what they have chosen to be in their lives. Citing number 77 of our Constitutions, “He (the Prefect) should aim at bringing them, more by example than by words, to embrace our way of life out of an inner conviction of faith.”
To know the life of our Martyrs, is to recognize the magnificent work that those who accompanied them carried out in their process of growth in the faith and in their configuration in Christ. They wanted to take their lives, but they in return donated it, deeply convinced of God’s love for them and their neighbor. Of the 51 Martyrs of Barbastro, 41 of them were young people between 25 and 21 years old; and with great conviction and living faith they expressed: “We all die happy with no regrets or feel faint; we all die praying to God that the blood that falls from our wounds will not be shed in vengeance, but blood that enters red and alive through your veins, stimulates your progress and expansion in the world” (Letter of Faustino).
The life offered by our brother Martyrs, with his love for the Congregation and for God’s call to follow Him, invites each formator to be in his life a faithful and generous witness of the love of God so that others, seeing their lives, can find the merciful love of God the Father, by which we must live our lives. In other words, his life must be a perennial Gospel.
